The past year’s events have stressed the need for organizations to have business continuity plans.
The Asian tsunami, the terrorist events of July, Hurricane Katrina and its devastating effects on New Orleans, the Pakistan earthquake, and the recent oil depot fire at Hemel Hempstead, UK are all examples of the risks businesses have faced in the past year.
Indeed, the latest event to raise the issue of disaster recovery (DR) procedures, the fire in the Buncefield oil depot in Hemel Hempstead, has proved damaging to several local businesses.
Much of the damage is physical, with warehouses getting caught in the blast. However, it is understood that at least one software vendor has been hit by the blast. Northgate Information Systems’ offices were badly damaged, and some back-up systems were affected.
On the day after the fire started, the company did have some problems with its customer service delivery. However, its remote data centers and other offices took over. The company had a DR plan in place, and had rehearsed it, but the damage was extensive and it took longer than anticipated to restore services.
In another example, Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge has had to revert to a manual system for patient information after its IT services supplier was affected by the fire. A spokesperson for the hospital has said that it will take a week to get its system back up and running.
The importance of having good contingency plans in place cannot be emphasized enough, yet for many companies the thought is usually that ‘it will never happen to us’. Unfortunately, sometimes events do happen! Organizations should be prompted by this major incident to review their DR plans, and test them out.
Indeed, after the various disastrous events over the last year, both natural and man-made, does anyone still need to be convinced of the need for a dynamic, up-to-date business continuity plan?
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
